1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a thin camera. More particularly, the present invention is directed to a thin camera using color filters and/or having an increased field of view.
2. Description of Related Art
A conventional camera 10, shown in FIG. 1A includes a lens 12 with a focal length f and a detector array 14, having a plurality of pixels. To realize color imaging, an array of filters 15 having some pattern, typically with more green filters than red or blue filters, is provided. An example of the filter array 15 is shown in FIG. 1B. Each filter in the filter array 15 corresponds to a detector, or pixel, in the detector array 14. However, this camera is relatively thick.
In creating a thin color camera, one solution uses compound eye image capturing, the size of the lens being in accordance with a desired thinness of the camera. Each lens in the compound eye corresponds to a plurality of pixels, with the compound eye being selected so that spacing of the lenses is not an integral multiple of pixel spacing. Thus, each lens looks at different shifted images. The lenses used in the compound eye image capturing system generally have low resolution, for example a PSF equal or larger than the area of each pixel. A resolution greater than that of an individual sub-camera is achieved by combining the images from multiple cameras. For this solution, a color filter array 15′ shown in FIG. 1C, has a color filter for each lens. Multiple lenses are used for each color and the images for each color combined. However, the use of compound eye image capturing is computationally intensive and it is difficult to achieve a resolution equal or close to that of the number of pixels in the sensor array for the entire composite image.